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Knives: Visualizing the Evisceration of America’s Rural Communities

After 150 years in upstate New York, a major knife company suddenly moved their operations to China, leaving more than 500 people without work. A microcosm of the increasing strains on rural America: outsourcing, drug abuse, straining social fabrics and more.

Photographs and text by Jason Koxvold

Knives: Visualizing the Evisceration of America’s Rural Communities

After 150 years in upstate New York, a major knife company suddenly moved their operations to China, leaving more than 500 people without work. A microcosm of the increasing strains on rural America: outsourcing, drug abuse, straining social fabrics and more.

“Knives” was a project made over several years, using documentary photography to trace the shifting relationships between masculinity, myth, and violence in a rural town whose economic base was eviscerated by globalization.

The cutlery industry formed the economic backbone of New York’s Hudson Valley for over 150 years, until the Schrade knife factory abruptly moved production to China in 2004, leaving 500 men and women out of work. Subsequently, the town’s maximum security prison, Eastern Correctional Facility, became the largest employer in the area. Yet it remains shielded from the wider community by layers of secrecy. As businesses continued to close in the decade that followed, drug abuse, mental disorders, and rare cancers have become more widespread.

“Knives” operates as two intertwined stories: one, a typological study of knives crafted in the region since the rise of the cutlery industry. This provides connective tissue to the other subject, which deals in the realities of the local community, both within the prison and without. The project serves as a microcosm of the larger issues facing the United States, which is grappling with the effects of automation and outsourcing, cuts in services, and the rise of identity politics all over the country.

—Jason Koxvold

Koxvold is in the process of creating a book of this work. If you’d like to donate to his Kickstarter fund, you can find more information on the project here.